Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the inaugural post of ESC Insider! From this humble little blog, I'll be periodically geeking out on my favorite topic of obsession: The Eurovision Song Contest. The good, the bad, the ugly, the campy, the politically charged, and the always entertaining. I won't be posting much in the way of breaking news (you might want to check out www.oikotimes.com or www.esctoday.com for that sort of thing), but I'll be offering you guys my personal reactions on the entries, the artists, and whatever else tickles my fancy! (Let's face it, people, it's my blog, and only about five people will be reading it, anyway!)

If, by some wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, you've tripped across my little chunk of HTML by happenstance, you might be wondering who I am, and how I've come to fall arse-over-teakettle in love with Eurovision. Well, I'm a twentysomething professional, living happily in the often wintry wonderland of Saint Paul, Minnesota.

"Wait, what?" you must be thinking to yourself, "not only is this person obsessed enough with Eurovision that she's dedicating her time to writing a blog about it, but she's not even European?! Ye, gads!"

I was lucky enough to grow up in a household where foreign language and culture were part of the game, even if those cultures weren't the ones that my family was descended from. When I went off to university, I picked a school where about 20% of the student body were international, so my worldview was expanded even further. One day, I was checking the day's news on the BBC's website, and there was an article tucked into the side panel of the Entertainment page that caught my interest. With one click, I was sucked into the world of Ruslana and Terry Wogan. I watched online the next year as Helena took the title for Greece, and the year afterwards, when I actually found myself giddy that Lordi had shattered Finland's abysmal forty-year losing streak, I realized that I was past my event horizon. I've downloaded literally hundreds of ESC songs from over the decades, from Teddy Scholten to Dschingis Khan to Sasha Son, and I can't wait to see what the next decades will bring!

4 comments:

So is this flag counter on the page one that counts visitors from each country per day, or just visitors from each country that ever came across this blog? Either way, it seems to prove down your theory that "only about five people will be reading it, anyway!"!